Co-organizer of EA Hamburg
Studying for M.Sc. in Energy Technology
B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering
Worked as research assistant while studying
Was part of TU Hamburgās Formula Student team for one season
Trained as a mechanic
After studying, I want to work on alternative protein.
Iād be interested in learning more on how to have the biggest impact when one wants to work towards systemic change: What are examples of EA or non-EA orgs who deliberately and successfully caused systemic change? What can we learn from those? Are there strategies/āapproaches that work particularly well?
And I am also curious about how one estimates the cost-effectiveness of interventions aimed towards systemic changes. I suspect the reason systemic change as a cause area is less visible in EA is because it is hard to measure. But work against global catastrophic risks show that interventions can be hard to measure and still be judged as effective. So that alone shouldnāt be enough to rule it out. But it probably helps to be able to make more precise predictions for the cost-effectiveness of systemic change intervention. So how do we get better at that? Is there research about that?
āFor example, an organisation fighting malaria might identify the lack of a fair distribution of resources to afford medicine and protective equipment as one root cause of the problem.ā
The most plausible, to me, root cause solution for this problem is a gene drive, which is not systemic change.
This is a good example to show that problems can have more than one root cause. Children dying of malaria is both caused by Aedes aegypti existing and by the childrenās parents not being able to access or afford treatment.
I just looked up the definition of root cause and Wikipedia says āA factor is considered the root cause of a problem if removing it prevents the problem from recurring.ā With that definition I can think of even more root causes for children dying of malaria. In fact most problems in the world probably have multiple root causes.
And as your example shows, different root causes can vary a lot in cost-effectiveness. In this case the gene drive seems more cost-effective. On the other hand, getting rid of poverty or having better healthcare infrastructure doesnāt only solve malaria deaths but also does a lot more good in other ways.
The standard comment sorting ignores what I have set in the settings as standard comment sorting and instead always sorts by New & upvoted by default.
I might have found a regression with the new post page when reading sequences: The āprevious postā and ānext postā buttons on the bottom are missing. For example in this post. Only the left and right arrows on the top and the possibility to go to the sequence overview between the two arrows are still there. I have also spotted this post, where the part at the top is also missing. It should be part of the same sequence.
The leading AI systems are now able to engage in limited conversation, solve college-level maths problems, explain jokes, generate extremely realistic images from text, and do basic coding.
This is a little outdated. The progress in AI is so fast that texts about AI capabilities become obsolete quite quickly.
AIs are now able to pass the Turing Test, win the International Math Olympiad, solve math problems that havenāt been solved by anyone before, and produce a significant percentage of all new code.
Also, the number of people working on AI capabilities and AI safety have both increased significantly. I donāt know if the ratio between them is still similar, but my guess would be that it is.
Thanks for this post. I especially found your point on treating the post-FTX challenge as a trust problem valuable. I always had a slightly bad feeling about this trend of trying to minimize reputational risks and distancing oneself from stuff that others might find controversial. After reading your post I have now more clarity regarding that.
Focussing on outward appearance comes with the risk of losing intellectual honesty and might not even be very effective at improving outward appearance as it is only treating the symptoms and might even seem deceptive or as if we had something to hide. I am not saying that one shouldnāt care about outward appearance at all, but maybe it shouldnāt be the main focus of dealing with the post-FTX challenge but rather thinking about it as a trust problem should be. The main priority should be to ensure that our community is worthy of our trust and that it creates value. I am aware that this is already happening to some degree, and I am not sure if it is possible to judge how much of it is by looking how much is publicly talked about it is, but if it is then outward appearance of EA is currently too much of a focus and making sure that EA is trustworthy, honest and true to its principles maybe deserves a little more attention.
Having a community worthy of our trust and one that is true to its original principles gets harder the larger the community gets, and it also gets harder when the community grows faster. I get the point that growing slower comes at a cost and more good can be done with a larger community but when slower growth means a healthier community that exists in a meaningful way for longer, then maybe that is a price we should be willing to pay.
Duncan Sabienās āMake more Grayspacesā is also interesting in this context. It describes a possible solution for how a growing community can stay true to its values. I am not sure if this solution would work for EA, but I found the description of the problem quite compelling.
I did, but I must confess that it wasnāt for me. For some reason I found it really annoying to hear the two AI voices so often talk about their reactions or how they āfeltā about a particular part of the book. I already find it annoying when humans do that instead of talking about the actual topic but when AIs fake that to appear more human like I find it quite irritating.
Sorry, I meant to write āideas are more uncomfortable when they are newā. Not because.
Since you wrote āforceā, I assumed youād be uncomfortable.
Yes, that is what I meant.
Ok, so your point is that ideas are more uncomfortable when they are new and when I already heard them, Iāll find them less uncomfortable?
Not yet. To give the podcast the best chance, Iāll start with a book summary that I think Iāll enjoy. Once Iāve finished it, Iāll decide how to proceed.
I am not sure what your point is regarding encountering those opinions in the wild. After listening to the book summary, it doesnāt get easier to control how long I immerse myself in this in a conversation. But I donāt think that is what you mean.
On your website you say that your goal with this project is to enable people to have their own informed opinion about a book so that they donāt just repeat headlines. This is obviously a good thing, but I was skimming through the list of books and I must admit that for some my first reaction was āok, youāll need to duraniumman that authorās position to make me update my uninformed opinion on that book!ā Of course, it is important to have a strong foundation on which to base a strong disagreement with a view. I am just not sure if I can force myself through it.
What is your view on this: If I rate the chance that my more informed view will be different to my less informed view very low and the chance that the experience will make me angry and sad very high, is it then worth doing?
I want to be able to engage with opinions that I disagree with but for some opinions I find this very challenging. I am often wondering about how hard I should push myself here. Any thoughts on that?
I donāt have a ChatGPT subscription. If I stop using their free tier, I think this has two effects: It benefits them because they can spend less resources on inference and it hurts them because investors lose trust in them. Do you think the expected net effect is positive or negative? Should I stop using their free tier if I want to protest against OpenAI?
Also, I noticed that I can check multiple boxes on https://āāquitgpt.org/āā and only one of them is āI cancelled my subscriptionā. If I understand the footnote below the number displayed at the top (currently 1,200,000) correctly, it counts everyone who checked any of the boxes. I would be more curious about how high the number of only the people is, who canceled their subscription or commit to not paying for ChatGPT in the future.
Update: The Venue has changed. We will meet at Gunnarās place (address above).
The first four slides work now but unfortunately when I continue to the fifth slide, I get an error again.
Edit: It looks like that issue was now also fixed. Thanks :)
Is the problem on my side or is it also broken for others?
We have an e-mail address that people can use to contact us. That is used for communication with new people until they come to their first event where they can join the Signal group.
Creating a new group every year sounds like something that might work, but it might also lead to some confusion. For example, if you try to find something someone wrote a while back. Iāll think about it. Thanks for the idea.
To prevent bots and too many inactive accounts, we only add people to our local groupās Signal chat that we have met in person or that someone already knows. Also, remember that you can reset the invite link. This can help when you get overrun by bots.
I think it makes sense to make it not too easy for people to get access to the group chat so that it feels private and personal, so people are less shy about writing there.
We still need a good way of handling the problem of inactive accounts in the Signal group. If a person turned up only once three years ago, maybe they no longer need to be in the group. But what is a good way of having an overview, which accounts can be removed and which canāt? Especially one that has as little overhead as possible. Does any of you have any Ideas about that? How do you handle this?
We currently have about 90 accounts in our group chat and maybe 20 or so people that actually write stuff in there and that come to events. Iād like to bring these two numbers closer together, so new people donāt think they write to 90 people when something like 70 of them will probably never read it.
Nice, thanks for updating your post with the additional data. But I think there is an error in the new graph. The bars for Founders Pledge are in the color of Longview Philanthropy and the bars for Longview Philanthropy seem to be missing.
(edit: no longer true, post has been updated to fix this)
There is also this post by Luke Moore and Sjir Hoeijmakers. They only compare 2023 and 2024, but they have also included funding data for Founders Pledge, Logview Philantropy, Macroscopic Ventures and a lot of smaller funders/āgrantmakers/āevaluators/āfundraisers. And they calculated that when including all of those, funding has actually increased. Mainly because of more funding through Founders Pledge and Navigation Fund.
Hi Isaac,
no, sorry, the talk will not be recorded. Some of Tobiasās earlier talks are available online, though.